EJ Ruek’s The Grimace and The Giggle

Today I ran across two situations which are the flip-sides of the same coin — a depressed author who writes marvelous middle grade YA stories (Yes, I’ve read her work) and a despairing literary agent who represents YA books. The author is seeking a literary agent and the literary agent is seeking clients — good clients.

Can the two of them get together?

No.

Why?

Because, though the author has:

1. good, solid publishing credits with a small publisher,
2. already proven she has the capacity to write wholesome, engaging novels one after another,
3. children and their parents who buy and read her books,

she couldn’t grab his attention with her query — a good query, too. Instant dismissal, with not even a blink.

The agent, meanwhile, decries the fact that he’s inundated with queries — bad queries, good queries, and mediocre queries — but can’t find clients he wants to represent. Very sad.

And the answer?

Well, my advice to the author is to keep writing and keep querying. My advice to the agent is to not so easily dismiss the received queries. Reject the obvious ones — bad spelling, bad grammar, obviously dull plot line — but don’t just dismiss out of hand those which might actually be gold when the first few pages of manuscript surface.

This today in Publisher’s Lunch which got it from http://www.businesswire.com/ :

You can also read about it here: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN0835916320080408

Poll Asks, Name Your Favorite Book
Harris Interactive surveyed American adults to find out “What is your favorite book of all time?” The answers:

1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
5. The Stand, by Stephen King
6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
7. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
8. Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
9. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
10. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

Anyone who practices a self-defense art and/or wields a weapon (gun, knife, sword, club/cane/staff) knows “ludicrous” when they read it. I just speed read a book with so many absolutely naive “fight scenes,” that the genre should have been slap stick comedy, rather than a supposedly serious commercial read. I won’t give out the title or author, but it was good for some hearty chuckles.

I really do wish folks wouldn’t try to write in the pow, bash, clang and bang stuff without help from someone who knows fighting — gun fighting, street fighting, or ring fighting. Heck, even someone who choreographs movie fights would work.

IN HER POST of March 30, 2008, Lori Perkins of L. Perkins Agency suggests that to get a major New York publisher interested, authors need to be able to guarantee at least 25,000 copies of their book will sell.

“…every book has to be perfect (not too long or short and well crafted) and come with a marketing plan. Which means you have to have quotes, a website and a list of bookstores where you can do readings. Every book that sells to a major New York publisher, whether it is a mass market, trade paperback or hardcover must be able to guarantee 25,000 copies sold, or it will not be published by a major publisher.”
http://agentinthemiddle.blogspot.com/2008_03_30_archive.html#4214233801960903095

From today’s Publishers Lunch:

Bob Miller’s new experimental start-up with HarperCollins took shape quickly after a casual discussion over drinks with Harper ceo Jane Friedman at the end of February. Miller says that he was “feeling restless and didn’t know what next mountain to climb” and was “talking about my frustration with the paradigms in this business.” He explained to Friedman how we would theoretically “do it all over again” and she encouraged him to put that plan into action. “I realized this was my time,” Miller says.

On some of the specific intentions of the new line, a 50/50 profit share with authors (and minimal advances) is a central tenet. But the idea of selling everything on a non-returnable basis was overstated in a WSJ report. Miller says “I definitely want to sell non-returnable if possible” particularly since that maximizes the profits to be shared and “the goal is to try and stop wasting money on things that don’t actually help sell books.” But he recognizes that conversations with retailers are an essential element of such a plan and that the process may “evolve after we start.”

As Miller notes, publishing today is “a race for margin” and “the current model is pretty broken,” adding that “it’s too tempting not to try” to improve on that paradigm.

If you intuited that the statement in the press release expressing the intention of “taking full advantage of the internet for sales, marketing and distribution” signals a desire for more direct selling online, then you were correct. “Definitely one of the things we want to experiment with is direct selling to consumers,” Miller told us, along with working in partnership with a variety of internet booksellers and other entities. He also hopes to “experiment with selling other formats” so that, for example, “people get the e-book and the audiobook with their purchase” of a print book.

Miller sees his “studio”–called that so as “to not be trapped by the definitions that already exist for publishing companies we know”–as comprising a “handful” of dedicated staff focused on “mostly nonfiction” titles. While recognizing that “an established author who is already making more than the publisher probably wouldn’t be interested” in the joint profit-sharing model, he adds that “I’d love it if established authors want to try off-the-beaten track” projects and experiments with the new venture. He says that “short low-price hardcovers” are “where I think the market is, and where I’ve had repeated success,” ranging from short books by David Halberstam and Steve Martin to FISH and the Mitch Albom titles. Which also allows for the wide-ranging experimentation to include books that are longer than magazine articles but shorter than conventional book titles.

So, authors and literary agents, is this good news or bad news for fiction and book publishing?

Way back when, Steinbeck was mandatory reading: Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath — all miserable books, hated by everyone in our class because the novels were so saturated with hopelessness, despair, and outright cruelty. “Oh,” but the teachers said, “it’s about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.” These “educators” said this with fatuous, raptured looks, spewing back to us what they had been indoctrinated to believe concerning these works and others which, likewise, visited the nightmares of misery, cruelty, and despair. We hated reading them, despised the terrible, depressing “realism” of their message, were devastated, even divested, of all hope or any belief in human goodness. Oh yes, the triumph of the human spirit despite every and all adversity.

What happened? A bunch of us, revolted by the depressing misery, rebelled. We refused to read the books, and our parents stood by us, going all the way to the school board, demanding that we be allowed to substitute books we chose to read — wholesome, even hopeful and happy books. And we won, but only because our parents backed our battle.

No one argues the worth of Steinbeck’s novels. No one considers them less than salient — pertinent, powerful presentations of the plight of man (and woman) in adversity caused by the cruelty and greed of man (and woman). Perhaps Steinbeck hoped to change the world…and did to some measure. His audience was, after all, the perpetrators and their wives. Remember, in 1930s and 40s, the folks who had the luxury to afford to buy Steinbeck’s books and the leisure to read them, never mind the literacy level to comprehend them, were the wealthy upper classes. These were the very people who gained from the exploitation of the unwashed masses. These were them who needed to hear Steinbeck’s message crying blood from story pages…not that it changed their perspectives in any fundamental and meaningful way. Life and cruelty, greed and exploitation continued, as they do today, in the U.S. and all over the world. But the subjects of Steinbeck’s works did find empowerment when some brave souls tried to commit change in human nature by organizing labor and forming representational organizations. They tried, but mostly failed, as is evidenced in the corruption and the exploitation of and by the very organizations that rose as defenders of the rights of these same strangled masses, organizations led by their own members risen through “the ranks.” It is the nature of man to exploit, after all, and, honestly, many of the strangled masses are the most vicious members of the human race.

Today we have books and movies which “celebrate the triumph of the human spirit despite every and all adversity. These works fervently dwell, not in a message delivered with Steinbeck’s knock-out punch of fictionalized exposé, but rather by acknowledging man’s nature as a cruel exploiter, then celebrating human triumph in adversity, despite adversity. The message? No matter what misery, pain, suffering, malady, and torture is perpetrated upon it, still the human spirit can survive. This is fiction which revels in placing its protagonists in such dire straits as to bring shudders even to the most inured of audiences — especially those — the focus not so much upon deliverance and especially not that which decries the perpetration of these evils, but, rather, that which accepts as expected and usual these vicious, exploitative acts. Then, if the victim chooses, this fiction demonstrates, despite all hopelessness and misery, a human can survive. …Puts me in mind of some spawn of Hitler’s legacy carrying out experiments to see just how long and how much a living being can survive any and all manner of the most horrific tortures that can be conceived, holding up the whimpering, bloodied living carcass, saying, “See? No matter what barbarism we can inflict, it can survive.”

But would you want to?

This sort of ugliness belongs, not in fiction, but in nonfiction exposé — works designed to stir an uprising against barbarism, works designed to make a difference, to change the nature of man’s actions to fellow man and fellow living creature.

Fiction, whether delivered in a movie or a book, needs to stop perpetrating the malady by demonstrating it as an acceptable status quo, of something we must face, acknowledge, and accept as norm. Rather, fiction should make us believe that human nature can be better, that the cruel and vicious, the malicious and barbaric, is not the norm and status quo. Fiction should never inure us to the predation and deprivation. It should, in fact, soften us, not harden us, so that, when we come upon the unkind acts of human hands and vicious minds, we move, outraged and in righteousness, to stop it.

I’ve seen references to this work several times, now, the latest on Janet Reid’s blog.

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http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2008/04/anyone-who-tells-you-agents-dont-read.html

FICTION: DEBUT
Scientist, doctor and researcher with over 50 major awards in science and a professor [of] medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. James Levine’s debut RIVER OF WORDS, the surprisingly hopeful story of 15-year old girl whose poverty-stricken family sells her into sexual slavery and she lives in a cage on the streets of Mumbai, but uses writing and imagination to transcend her reality, to Cindy Spiegel at Spiegel & Grau, for six figures, in a pre-empt, by Natanya Wheeler at the Lowenstein-Yost (who found the manuscript in the agency slush pile) (world).

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With no apology, my idea of a good book does not include the ugliness of sexual slavery and locking fifteen-year-old girls in cages to be sexually abused by whomever pays their owner’s price. I cannot even imagine the kind of society that would find something like this entertaining, never mind the society that condones it. I cannot imagine anyone thinking this is good fiction. I could see a nonfiction exposé, yes, all profits from the sale of the work to go to stopping these practices worldwide. But to sell a work as FICTION containing, even ENTERTAINING, the gravity of this situation — the enslavement of children for perverted pleasure — NO. Is this the whole name of the game now? Fiction must be gruesome, too horrible to contemplate, filled with abuse and sordidness?

There are a couple of authors in my writing group who also write the gruesome and the sordid as their chosen venue. I live with Pepto-Bismol when I must read the unforgivable sins of their characters. Would I buy the works? No. Not one. I do not add books to my collection which cause me anguished nightmares. I will not nestle a tome of unseemliness and ugliness next to books of lasting endearment such as the works of Conrad Richter (The Trees, The Fields, The Town), Charlotte’s Web by Garth Williams, and All Creatures Great and Small and the rest by James Herriot, the Retief series, the Polifax series, or even next to Evangeline Walton, Greg Bear and more modern authors.

If I can’t have fiction which transcends the filthiness rampant in the news, the barbaric celebration of lewd misconduct, then I simply won’t buy or read.

You know what’s sad about Ms. Reid’s post? The fact that Janet Reid used it as a good example of something which came from the query slushpile. Do you want to know what probably drew the agent’s attention? The author’s credits (Notice them placed as the opening line in the PL deal blurb.) — ” Scientist, doctor and researcher with over 50 major awards in science and a professor [of] medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. James Levine’s….” Why didn’t Janet Reid pick something else that was more demonstrative of a regular author selling a good, as opposed to sordid, work of fiction?

This morning I woke up, fed the cats and the birds, but not the fish.

This morning I woke up the computer after keeping it up last night way past its normal bedtime.

This morning I started my writing day by fielding a couple of requests, then grabbed my coffee and settled in for my morning ritual of picking somebody’s blog to read.

The first two picks were unsatisfactory — popular blogs with the purported literary mavens, true, but there wasn’t anything in them to prick the mind’s ears, not of this novelist. Then, LUCK — Jim MacCarthy’s post on the Dystel & Goderich Literary Management blog.

I won’t spoil it for you. Enjoy. http://dglm.blogspot.com/2008/04/jim-mccarthys-reading-process.html

And now it’s time to feed the fish.

Well, having thought long and hard on Janet Reid’s post of March 30, 2008, I think my best option is to finish the S.L. novel, and shop it instead of the recently completed T.W. or the nearing completion T.V.S. That said, I probably ought to email the agents with T.W. and pull it from consideration. I won’t, but, if the first book is the easiest to sell, the second and third ones harder unless the first does exceptionally well, it seems wise to back off of shopping T.W. Since I know S.L. is a hot property even though it isn’t author final yet, I suppose that’s where I’ll head. Sad, because T.W. is a very good read — serious, though, not funny/scary like S.L. — but, hey, you gotta go with what you know is going to be a hot seller in any market, so now everything gets shelved except for S.L.

Yet, I believe in T.W. It’s a potent story. Oh well. If you only have one shot, I guess it’s best to do the “for sure, for sure, good buddy” book, even though it isn’t my primary style and genre, but a secondary subgenre. Hmmm. Wish I could ask someone…like a literary agent.

You ever heard ants chewing your house down from inside the walls? It’s this faint, constant crunching sound…like Lilliputians eating tiny bites of toast.

If you want to hear it, click this link.*

That’s what was going on inside my brain this weekend.

While this wonderful chewing was happening, I wrote a short story, something I do maybe once a year, maybe only once every two years. I’ve got three to my name — “short story by EJ” — one of them over at RedBubble where I mistakenly posted it for a contest BEFORE they changed the stipulations to read that they wanted flash. I suppose I should go over there and remove it, but…later.

Meanwhile, back to the ants chewing inside my brain.

I wrote the other day (2008/03/28/) about a woman who received an offer for representation IF she changed her MG (middle grade) novel as requested by the literary agent. Among other things, the agent wanted more sex and a fling with homosexuality included in the escapades of the story’s eleven-year-old main protagonist. When the woman complied with “the other things” the agent wanted, but refused to add sex and homosexual activities, the agent refused representation.

That’s the killer for me: THE AGENT REFUSED REPRESENTATION.

Now, never mind my sentiments about whether or not middle grade books need sex and homosexuality in them. That’s for parents, publishers, and authors to decide — yes, authors, too. If that’s what they all want, go right ahead. I certainly won’t buy the book as a present for a child, voting with what counts these days - a purchase. And, if you don’t like the idea, then, for heaven’s sake, don’t buy the book, don’t produce the book, and don’t write it into the book. But the publisher, the parent, and the author all can choose what to do for themselves.

Personally, I’m very glad Suzy_Q stuck by her guns and said, “No,” to that change request. But here’s the killer for me. Though Suzy_Q’s work was good enough to interest the agent IF she inserted the sexual content, why wasn’t the author and her work good enough to sign for representation? Wasn’t the story good enough? If it wasn’t, why would the agent be interested in the first place? Why would a Random House editor be interested in the first place? I mean, what? The only reason they wanted the book was FOR the opportunity to add sexual and homosexual content? This makes no sense to me.

And the ants chew.

So…the story was good enough ONLY if it had sexual content — eleven-year-olds exploring sexuality for other eleven-year-olds to read about? What happened to plot? Story? A riveting read?

Shouldn’t a book stand on the merit of the story with or without sexual content? I know I write my books both ways — the version with more explicitness and the tamed down version. (My finals are usually all the tamed down version.)

And then this question rises: Are literary agents signing the book or the author? Looks to me like it is the book, not the author. Looks to me like the long-term agent-author relationship might be the thing being screwed here. I ponder. The ants are chewing away.

Anybody got any thoughts out there? Anyone have any solid ideas, maybe even answers? I’d sure like to get this chewing to stop.



* Ant sounds are recorded by Adriano Zanni, located at: www.punck.net of http://www.punck.net/soundscapes/ants/index.htm